Broad Group and their factory mass produced skyscrapers featured in Wired

Broad has built 16 structures in China, plus another in Cancun. They are fabricated in sections at two factories in Hunan, roughly an hour’s drive from Broad Town. From there the modules—complete with preinstalled ducts and plumbing for electricity, water, and other infrastructure—are shipped to the site and assembled like Legos. The company is in the process of franchising this technology to partners in India, Brazil, and Russia. What it’s selling is the world’s first standardized skyscraper, and with it, Zhang aims to turn Broad into the McDonald’s of the sustainable building industry.

For two decades, Zhang’s AC business boomed. But a couple of events conspired to change his course. The first was that Zhang became an environmentalist, a gradual awakening that he says began 10 or 12 years ago. The second was the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that hit China’s Sichuan Province in 2008, causing the collapse of poorly constructed buildings and killing some 87,000 people. In the aftermath, Zhang began to fixate on the problem of building design. At first, he says, he tried to convince developers to retrofit existing buildings to make them both more stable and more sustainable. “People paid no attention at all,” he says. So Zhang drafted his own engineers—300 of them, according to Jiang—and started researching how to build cheap, environmentally friendly structures that could also withstand an earthquake.

The best way to cut costs, he decided, was to take building to the factory—and as a manufacturer of massive AC units, he knew how factories worked. But to create a factory-built skyscraper, Broad had to abandon the principles by which skyscrapers are typically designed. The whole load-bearing structure had to be different. To reduce the overall weight of the building, it used less concrete in the floors; that in turn enabled it to cut down on structural steel. The result was the T30, 90 percent of which was built inside the factory. And Zhang says this percentage will only rise with future buildings: The more that happens in the factory, he says, the safer and less wasteful construction becomes.

The majority of apartment buildings going up in China are equally ugly. Broad’s biggest selling point, amazingly enough, is in the quality. In a nation where construction standards vary widely, and where builders often use cheap and unreliable concrete, Broad’s method offers a rare sort of consistency. Its materials are uniform and dependable. There’s little opportunity for the construction workers to cut corners, since doing so would leave stray pieces, like when you bungle your Ikea desk. And with Broad’s approach, consistency can be had on the cheap: The T30 cost just $1,000 per square meter to build, compared with around $1,400 for traditional commercial high-rise construction in China.

The building process is also safer. Jiang tells me that during the construction of the first 20 Broad buildings, “not even one fingernail was hurt.” Elevator systems—the base, rails, and machine room—can be installed at the factory, eliminating the risk of a technician falling down a 30-story elevator shaft. And instead of shipping an elevator car to the site in pieces, Broad orders a finished car and drops it into the shaft by crane. In the future, elevator manufacturers are hoping to preinstall the doors, completely eliminating any chance that a worker might fall.

While Jiang focuses on bringing Broad buildings to the world, her boss is fixated on the company’s most outlandish plan—the J220, a factory-built 220-floor behemoth that would just happen to be the tallest building in the world. It’s hard to say for sure that the 16-million-square-foot plan isn’t entirely a publicity stunt. But Zhang has hired some of the engineers who worked on the current height-record holder, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and Broad has created two large models of “Sky City” (as the J220 has been nicknamed). The foundation is scheduled to be laid in November at a site in Hunan; if everything goes well, the building will be complete in March 2013. All in all, including factory time and onsite time, construction is expected to take just seven months. Again, that’s assuming it really happens: When my guide at the T30 plugs in one of the models and the lights flicker on, he tells me, “My chairman says we have to attract eyes. We have to shock the world.”

But if all Broad ever does is build 30-story skyscrapers—in 15 days, at $1,000 per square meter, with little waste and low worker risk, and where the end result can withstand a 9.0 quake—it will have shocked the world quite enough.

The 220 Sky City One will be built in an outlying area of Changsha

Pictures of parts of the modular factory process

AC Units

The AC units that Zhang still manufactures are gigantic, barge-sized affairs. The so-called micro chillers weigh 6 tons; the largest is 3,500 tons and can cool 5 million square feet. The technology Broad employs, called absorption cooling, is an old one. Instead of using electricity to compress a refrigerant from a gas to a liquid and back again, nonelectric air conditioners use natural gas or another source of heat to turn a special liquid (typically a solution containing lithium bromide) into vapor; as the vapor condenses, it cools the air around it. Today, Broad has units operating in more than 70 countries, cooling some of the largest buildings and airports on the planet. These systems are all monitored from a central headquarters in Broad Town: When an air conditioner malfunctions in Brazil, an alarm goes off in Hunan.